The Weather looks Great for the Peach Ride Sunday

The Salem Bicycle Club's Peach of a Century Ride is this weekend, and if you are looking for a fun, but long, ride through the rolling Waldo Hills, the weather looks perfect - 75 degrees and "mostly sunny." That's Goldilocks weather for a bike ride, not too hot, not too cold!

Day-of-Ride registration (for $45) starts at 7:30am on Sunday the 11th. (Full description and forms here.)

Each route starts and ends at Chemeketa Community College. The full century route is challenging with some steep hills. The 76-mile route also involves a significant amount climbing. The Metric Century route offers flat to rolling terrain with some moderate hills. (See the GPS tracks for more information about total elevation gain on the routes, but note the differences in the vertical scales when comparing the route profiles.) The routes follow low-volume roads past the farm fields of the Willamette Valley, through forested foothills and rural communities east of Salem....The 100-mile route goes through Jefferson, Scio, Stayton, Sublimity, and Silverton. The Metric Century route visits Jefferson and Stayton. The 76-mile route visits Jefferson, Scio, and Stayton.

There are three rest stops on the 100-mile route and two on the 66 and 76-mile routes. All rest stops have food, water, sports drink, restrooms and the friendly volunteers of the Capitol Kiwanis Club. All riders must finish by 6:00 p.m. A sag vehicle will sweep both courses at day's end.

But it has seemed like there is a slow but sure drift away from these kinds of rides.

Third Bridge at Parks and Recreation Board; Portland Road Crosswalks at NGRAB, Thursday

The North Gateway Redevelopment Advisory Board meets Thursday the 8th, and they'll be talking about the initial selection of candidates for enhanced crosswalks on Portland Road.

Some initial conversations with businesses on Portland Road has generated three candidates, at Stortz, Carleton, and one mid-block crossing further south.

Fifth Area Person on Foot Struck and Killed This Year

From the Marion County Sheriff this morning:

Deputies with the Marion County Sheriff's Office are on scene and investigating a traffic crash that has left one person dead on Cordon Road NE near Carolina Avenue NE in Salem. From their initial investigation deputies believe a person was walking in the middle of Cordon Road NE when they were struck by an oncoming vehicle.

The person walking in the roadway was killed instantly, the driver of the only vehicle involved was not injured....

Cordon Road has reopened to regular traffic, the Sheriff's Office has concluded that an adult male, was walking in the middle of Cordon Road NE when he was struck by a north bound driver who as headed to work.

The Sheriff's Office has not been able to identify the deceased male as he had no identification and may have been homeless. The Sheriff's Office is withholding all of the names of the involved parties until proper identifications and notifications can be made, that time frame is not yet known.

Update, Wednesday the 7th

From the Sheriff:

Deputies have identified the deceased involved in Tuesday's fatal crash. Baxter Harrell, age 51 of Aumsville was walking down the center line of Cordon Road NE when he was struck by an on coming vehicle being driven by Josefina Cabrera, age 51, of Salem.

According to family Mr. Baxter left his residence earlier in the evening for a walk, it is unknown how he ended up so far from his residence or why he was walking in the middle of the road. Ms. Cabrera is cooperating with investigators and no citations have been issued.

This post will be updated.

Previously killed this year:

• Olivia Stroup
• Jaren Nash  
• Alex Armes
• Anthony Earnest 

At the Planning Commission: The Uphill Climb for Walkable Neighborhoods

The Planning Commission meets on Tuesday the 6th, there are a few things to note about the ways we still struggle to make the land-use-health-transportation connections.

In one is news about a significant procedural change:

Previously, it was policy of the City of Salem Planning Commission to make the determination for approval of a comprehensive plan map amendment. However, in light of a recent decision by the Land Use Board of Appeals...the City of Salem has adjusted the policy to be consistent with State Law [that a comprehensive plan map amendment must be adopted by a local government's governing body].

So now we'll be seeing a whole bunch of this as boilerplate:

Approval of the zone change and site plan review decision shall be contingent on the City Council's decision on the Comprehensive Plan Map Change.

Every time the Planning Commission looks at a Comprehensive Map Plan Change in tandem with a zoning change, one of the Conditions of Approval will be this contingency.

So effectively that means there's an automatic appeal to Council every time.

Does this mean the end of the Planning Commission as a meaningful quasi-judicial review board?

Will this add to a desire to simplify and even eliminate parts of our exclusionary zoning scheme that really hampers our ability to create walkable neighborhoods?

Change at the Tennis Club

The matter in which the new contingency and Condition of Approval appeared is a proposal to change the zoning for the Salem Tennis and Swim Club:

In 1962, the Marion County Planning Commission granted a variance to the Salem Tennis and Swim Club to construct buildings, tennis courts and swimming pools for use exclusively for community club purposes by a non-profit community club...the applciant is seeking to change the ownership and operation of the existing club facility from non-profit to for-profit ownership [which requires a zoning change].

There must be an interesting story here. In the applicant materials they say

Unfortunately, the Club needs to sell the property and facilities. Fortunately, for the current members of the Club, the Applicant is willing and able to step in and purchase the Subject Property and facilities and continue to tennis and swim operation...

The Kroc Center has struggled, the YMCA and YWCA have struggled - is the model of the fitness and recreation club undergoing some real demographic and structural change?

It seems like there are better ways to incorporate moderate exercise into daily routines and that the drive-to-exercise-indoors model may be decreasingly popular. (More on that down below.)

The Preferred Alternative is an Expensive Damp Squib

So one of the things that stands out in the Traffic and Transportation Technical Report Addendum is the fact that the improvement the Preferred Alternative generates is not actually all that striking. It might be nothing, in fact.

Shouldn't there be more green???
In 2040 close-in the Bridge significantly helps 5 intersections
and makes 4 of them much worse during the morning rush.

Even when you accept the internal assumptions and traffic modeling of the SRC, the number of key intersections that operate with acceptable volume/capacity ratios isn't as big as you'd expect for a $500 million investment.

If there's any kind of scoring for cost/benefit or return on investment, the Preferred Alternative wouldn't actually score very well.

The Traffic Addendum shows four maps with a set of key intersections rated for "meeting mobility standards." (You'll notice the numbering of the maps is non-consecutive; I think they are ordered in a way that hinders apples-to-apples comparison.)

Flex Lanes or Contra-flow Lanes on Existing Bridges could Meet Transportation Need

Each time we have a crash or blockage on the Center or Marion Street Bridges, we go through a bunch of hand-wringing about "wouldn't it be nice to have a third bridge." Of course, relative to big-city congestion, even our crash-induced congestion rates short-lived and minor.

Detail from August crash (see below for more)

But each time we have these crashes and traffic gets backed up on one bridge, there are often aerial shots or other traffic camera shot that show easy free-flow traffic in the opposite direction.

These incidents illustrate ways we possess and misuse excess capacity on our existing bridges. The result feeds our false narrative that we need to build a super-duper expensive new bridge.

Can Widening the Existing Bridges Meet Need and Avoid UGB Expansion?

The new Land Use memo (see previous note for more on it) directly engages the question whether Alternative 2A, widening the existing bridges, can "reasonably accommodate the transportation need" and therefore obviate the need for a Urban Growth Boundary enlargement.

Detail of Alternative 2A, from the DEIS, Chapter 2
(N.B. not from the Land Use Addendum)

We read in the June 2014 letter from the DLCD to the SRC team that

The second major step [in the UGB expansion process] requires that Salem prove that the need cannot reasonably be accommodated (language in both Goal 14 and in 660-024 implementing rules) inside the existing Salem-Keizer UGB. This is probably the most important and difficult step in the analysis. For example, the findings will have to show that the alternatives that involve widening the existing bridges only, or adding a new bridge next to the existing bridges in the urban growth boundary, do not reasonably accommodate the need.

Section 4.4.2 of the Land Use Addendum is devoted to this question in general, and subsection 4.4.2.4 "Can Alternative 2A Reasonably Accommodate the Transportation Need?" directly looks at it.

Finally untethered from all the expository material in the report, this is one of the principal analytical moments in the memo.

Its conclusion is negative, that

the evidence and findings for the UGB amendment will support the conclusion that Alternative 2A cannot reasonably accommodate the transportation need...

This is summarized in table 4.4-3.

There are seven claims or tests, and the analysis asserts that Alternative 2A fails to meet four of them unambiguously.